64 ^"h .4j) A ---.. -=-- Jr;f:r "You wanted to miss the Matisse show. " . militant and more provincial. Sharpton, however, had been taken up by his elders at such an impressionable age that, for all his histrionics, he was a far better communicator with whites than most of his peers were. He talked to Sutton, Jones, Jackson, and some of his other mentors about running for the Senate, and they encouraged him. N ew York's arcane election laws made it almost impossible for Sharpton to get on the primary ballot without the help of the Democratic Party state chair- man, John Marino, who answers to Governor Cuomo. When Sharpton an- nounced, in January of 1992, "I intend to formally throw my hair into the ring," Marino told the News, 'We'll deal with him in the same fashion Louisiana Re- publicans dealt with David Duke." Sharpton responded, "I'm not advocat- ing black supremacy and I've never ad- vocated violence." His claims were true, but they were not what changed Marino's mind. Noting Sharpton's on- again, off-again ties to the New Alliance Party, the Democrats reasoned that the last thing they needed in a tough race against D'Amato was a third-party can- didate, with superb access to the media, ridiculing their nominee And Cuomo, it was said, hoped that in the Demo- . cratic primary Sharpton would siphon more black votes from two of the likely contenders, Abrams and Holtzman, than from Geraldine Ferraro, whom the Governor preferred. Sharpton, too, used his color-as " 'acceptable' blackmail," says former Mayor Edward Koch. "He said to them, 'Listen, if you give almost every other candidate a listing on the ballot with- out petition signatures, then I'm en- tided to it, too.' If they'd kept him off: though, it wouldn't have had anything to do with racism-they'd kept Lyndon LaRouche off-it would've been because Sharpton was an exotic. Nevertheless, because he is black, and because white politicians can never be in a situation where somebody, rightly or wrongly, yells racism, they would buckle. And he knew that. I mean, he plays them like a piano board." Through maneuvers with Marino and at the state conven- tion, Sharpton eluded some rules and became an official Democratic candidate without a single petition signature or the formal, public endorsement of any Party leader. Sharpton's campaign was under- funded, but the black inner-city churches supported rum as both prodigal and fa- vorite son. And on the streets, black THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 25,1993 politicians crossing his path noticed, he drew spontaneous crowds. "People just pushed past Towns to get to Sharpton," one of Representative Edol- phus Towns's campaign aides recalls of an outdoor "family day" rally at a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Towns had endorsed Holtzman, but he immediately changed his itinerary to stay overnight in the project with Sharpton. Sharpton also worked in boardrooms, suburban churches, and the parlors of brownstones to win the support of black professionals, who felt that none of the other candidates understood their special frustrations. As a group, first- generation black homeowners have heavier mortgages and fewer assets than whites, and even in good times segrega- tion keeps their property values lower. Also, middle-class blacks told Sharp- ton, their careers felt tenuous. Patri- cia Irvin, a Wall Street lawyer and a trustee of Princeton University, who supported Sharpton, says, "It's not gut racism that keeps a white partner from taking a black associate under his wing. But black associates don't get equally promising assignments. There's no way to discuss it, because people become very d .c . " elenSIve. Sharpton may have seemed a dubious champion of the struggle agaInst the "glass ceiling." But he, too, had a résumé-of racial encounters he had handled with ingratiation as well as con- frontation. At campaign forums on Wall Street, his intimidating appearance and reputation made everybody tense; then he would break the tension with humor, to the relief of blacks who had expected to be embarrassed and whites who had expected to be damned. He understood the issues at least as well as his oppo- nents; at a forum sponsored by Black Democrats of Westchester, Abrams, Holtzman, and a surrogate for Ferraro traded petty ethics charges, but Sharpton spoke convincingly to black-middle-class concerns. Sharpton was closer to those concerns than many of his listeners knew. In 1990, his family, facing eviction from their apartment, in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, for nonpayment of rent, and weary of dangers to him in New York, had managed, with the help of friends, to take a twelve-hundred- dollar-a-month garden apartment on a